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This chapter explores the development of Russian modernism and avant-garde trends into the 1920s in relation to the new institutions of the Silver Age (1890s–1917), pausing on why the period has proven hard to define. It discusses key modernist journals and the social contexts, including groups and societies, that were formative for writers. How these cultural processes changed in Soviet Russia under a regime of political and aesthetic state control, and in Russia Abroad, is charted. While Socialist Realism became the dominant aesthetic from the 1930s, the chapter shows how innovations in language and theory (including Formalism and structuralism) as well as independent literary institutions bypassed official doctrines and led to important experimentation. The chapter tracks a number of phenomena bridged unofficial literary culture and the post-Soviet literary field.

This chapter describes the poet and activist Olena Teliha who became a OUN icon. Born in St. Peterspurg, Teliha was educated along with the elite members of her city. She founded the journal “Litavry” and headed the Union of Ukrainian Writers. She was influenced by Dontsov's ideas and joined the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), denouncing her compatriots who disagreed with OUN's ideology. OUN cultivated her image as the equivalent of the male hero.

In the 1920s, David Johnson Leisk sought employment in New York City, first as an assistant art director in Macy’s advertising department. At the age of twenty-one, he became the first art editor of Aviation, which later changed its name to Aviation Week. While he was receiving an on-the-job education in layout and design, Dave began taking typography and graphic design classes at New York University’s School of Fine Arts. After his stint at McGraw-Hill, Dave turned left, joining the Book and Magazine Writers Union and reading Communist publications such as the Daily Worker and New Masses. He befriended others in the movement, including Charlotte Rosswaag, with whom he fell in love, as well as Mary Elting and her future husband, Franklin “Dank” Folsom. Dave began to contribute to New Masses, on which his first cartoon appeared in April 1934. He signed his first cartoons simply “Johnson,” and later “C. Johnson,” although New Masses nearly always printed his byline as “Crockett Johnson.” Dave Leisk had become radical cartoonist Crockett Johnson.

Part V explores the relationship between the dramatic history of the twentieth century and the transformations of Russian literary culture and poetics, arguing that the story is one of unexpected continuities as much as rupture. The Part outlines the development of Russian modernism and the avant-garde in the Silver Age (1890s–1917), moving on to the avant-garde poetics and institutions reinvented in late Soviet (1960s–early 1980s), and treating underground and post-Soviet literature (since 1991), as well as the émigré literature of Russia Abroad. Émigré and Soviet literature are shown to follow some similar patterns and themes, just as official and underground literature alike explore ways to represent the century’s catastrophes, and to test the responsibilities of the intelligentsia. The desire to break with the past emerges as a theme, as does a struggle over forms of cultural continuity. Women writers play key roles across multiple time periods, locales, and aesthetic forms. Part V analyzes the workings of political and aesthetic censorship during the domination of Socialist Realism, and it explores poetry as a discourse of subjectivity. It includes attention to utopian/dystopian and national narratives, and ends with an account of the intelligentsia’s cultural and historical self-identification.